Software Developer/Computer Scientist
jonathan.p.schuster@gmail.com
Blog
I'm a software-developer-turned-computer-scientist living in the Boston area. I fell in love with programming when I started coding on my TI-83+ calculator back in high school, and it's stuck with me ever since. My mission is to make software development easier by improving programming languages and the ecosystems around them.
I earned my Ph.D. in computer science from Northeastern University in May 2019, focusing on programming languages. My dissertation research focused on verifying actor-based programs (such as those written in Erlang or the Akka framework) against behavioral specifications expressed as simple name-passing automata.
Before grad school, I majored in computer science at Notre Dame, then worked for four years as a developer at Clarity Consulting, a medium-sized software consulting firm in Chicago. While I loved developing software, I saw that the languages and tools programmers use every day have a vast untapped potential to help programmers write less-buggy software, faster. That observation convinced me to get a Ph.D. in programming languages and focus my career on using that potential to make software development easier for everyone.
I currently work as a developer at Google, and I'm always on the lookout for ways to apply my research-level skills and knowledge of programming languages to the software development process.
Specification and Verification of Actor Protocols with Finite-State Machines
Dissertation
Northeastern University, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, 2019
Specifying Finite-State Actors
With Stephen Chang and Matthias Felleisen
Technical Report NU-CCIS-TR-2015-001
Northeastern University, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, 2015